How Chocolate Is Made
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What is the origin of chocolate?
Chocolate is one of the most popular foods on the planet. But did you know it all comes from this weird-looking fruit shaped like a dinosaur egg? In this video, I'll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made. And at the end, we'll use all the chocolate you'll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world's largest chocolate bar. And it all starts with the cacao tree. This right here is where it all begins. This little flower here will eventually grow into a pod, which will eventually grow into something slightly bigger, then bigger, then even bigger, and then finally into something like this. So yes, technically chocolate does grow on trees. So now that you have some context on where cacao comes from, I'm gonna introduce you to a really close friend of mine who I call the modern day Willy Wonka. He's a little crazy, but he knows more about chocolate than anyone on this planet. Hey, what's up? Odette! You come to see some cacao? I'm ready for chocolate, baby. Let's go see it.
So these guys have already picked a bunch of pods for us to look at. Oh my gosh! Cacao really kind of does look like a big ice cream cone. The seeds can come right off of the cacao pod like that. This is all gonna be opened up now so they can take the seeds out. There's no machine. All the chocolate that we eat is harvested by hand.
How is cacao harvested?
For the world record that we're gonna attempt later in this video, we need 250,000 cacao pods. So this is just the start. So you can eat this right now. and you suck off all the white pulp on the outside of each seed. When you don't dry the cacao beans, they're purple inside. It tastes a little bit like lychee, pineapple, citrusy, kind of almost like a bit of a sour banana sometimes. It's phenomenal. There are two main things you can do with this cacao fruit. You can drink the juice of the cacao fruit. Think of cacao water like coconut water, but 10 times better. And then what's the other thing? Obviously chocolate. You take the beans, ferment them, grind them, turn them into chocolate. Let's go see how it's made. That's it.
Before we go to the actual chocolate factory, we're at the place where they make the cacao water. We separate the pulp from the beans. Beans goes to make chocolate, pulp goes to make cacao water. We put it into the cold press machine, getting all the cacao water out. And that's gonna be the freshest cacao water you'll ever taste? Ever. It looks a little like coconut water. It gives you a little bit of a kick that you get from biting a lemon slice. And it just tastes kind of tropical. Chocolate is bitter, sometimes sour, earthy. This is sweet, fresh, citrusy. But never in a million years would you think that this kind of flavor is associated with chocolate. If you want to get creative, you can also turn this fruit pulp into cacao fruit leather. You guys know how much I love making fruit leather. or even these chewy cacao fruit snacks which look a lot like ground turkey while they're being made. But now that we've seen how you can use that fruity outer part of the beans, we'll go see how the inside of the bean is used to make chocolate.
We've made it to the chocolate factory, and take a guess at what's in all these different bags around me. If you guessed cacao beans, you'd be right. But these beans can't go inside the factory until they've been fermented and dried. Fermenting the beans is an important step that allows them to develop all of that chocolatey flavor. In about a week, they'll go from looking like this to something like this.
What happens during the fermentation process?
You can smell their fermentation. They smell a little bit, yeah, like a little bit like yeasty sourdough bread. Exactly. What would a chocolate bar taste like if you didn't ferment? Very bland, flat, probably just bitter, boring, nothing like interesting. And then you take this to the drying process. Once all the cacao is laid out to dry, it just sits here in the hot Ecuadorian sun. And there's so much of it that I can literally make a chocolate snow angel. All these seeds that are drying here, they flip them over every 15 to 30 minutes to make sure that they're constantly being moved and that new ones are in the sun to dry.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the origin of chocolate?
0:00–1:02
2
How is cacao harvested?
1:02–2:45
3
What happens during the fermentation process?
2:45–5:21
4
How is chocolate made at the factory?
5:21–7:53
5
What are Hershey's Kisses and how are they made?
7:53–13:32
6
How do they ensure quality in chocolate production?
13:32–17:49